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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

James Beard Honors Allan Benton

Well-Deserved Recognition

You can search the food world over and
you'll never find a nicer guy than Allan Benton. He runs a modest
little shop in a way off the beaten path place in the hills of East
Tennessee. I won't say he doesn't know the meaning of the word
“pretension” because he's a smart guy and I'm sure he does. But
he doesn't exhibit an ounce of it. He keeps his shoulder to the wheel
the same as he has every day since 1973 when he took over an
established smokehouse operation started by Albert H. Hicks in 1947
and renamed it “Benton's Smoky Mountain Country Hams.” Ask him
and he'll tell you he doesn't do anything special. His business isn't
rocket science, he says. “If it was, I surely couldn't do it.” He
avers over and over that he “ain't nothin' but an ol' hillbilly.”

Having spent more than forty years in
various parts of the South, I know a lot of “ol' hillbillies.”
But Allan Benton is the only one I know who has a James Beard award.

After being praised for years by top
chefs from coast to coast – including the “Top Chef” himself,
Tom Colicchio – the “ol' hillbilly” from Virginia and East
Tennessee has been recognized by the
renowned James Beard Foundation when they recently inducted him into the
annals of “Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America.” And it's
about time.

Awards from the James Beard Foundation
are the culinary equivalents of the Oscars. Only the best of the best
are chosen. From www.jamesbeard.org,
“The James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in
America is a cadre of the most accomplished food and beverage
professionals in the country. Though they represent a diverse
cross-section of the food and beverage industry—from chefs to
journalists to farmers to business executives to scholars—each has
been identified by his or her peers as having displayed remarkable
talent and achievement. Every member of the Who’s Who has
contributed in some substantial way to America’s constantly
evolving culinary scene.” And that last line is Allan Benton in a
nutshell.

Allan Benton is a national treasure. As
in the old song, Allan was “country when country wasn't cool.” He
learned his trade at the hands of his parents and grandparents and he
stayed true to those time-honored methods in spite of pressures to
modernize, expand, and capitalize. His persistence and dedication to
quality paid off handsomely when the rest of the world finally caught
on to what he'd known all along.

There were lean times. His hams and
bacon sold well enough locally to customers who dropped by his store
on Highway 411 North in Madisonville, but he wasn't exactly storming
the ramparts of commercial suppliers like Hormel and Oscar Meyer.
And, truth be told, he didn't really want to because in order to
compete with those national entities, or even with regional bigshots
like Valleydale, he would have had to have changed his methods. He
could have installed brine injectors and automated slicers and all
the other trappings of factory produced ham and bacon, but he chose
to stay true to his roots. And in doing so, he positioned himself at
the forefront of a movement that hadn't even taken shape yet. Talk
about cutting edge!

It took a recent fire in the smokehouse
to get Allan to expand a little. But his storefront is still the same
as it's been for decades. So is his office, located just to the left
of the front door. Sometimes he's in there on the phone. Sometimes
he's back in the smokehouse. Sometimes he's on the sales floor
chatting with customers who no longer hail just from Madisonville.
Oh, the locals are still there, but on any given day, Allan can be
found mingling with people from Maine or California or Florida or
Texas or maybe Canada. The grocery store chains hound him for the
rights to sell his products. He declines. Same reason as always; in
order to supply a store like Kroger the way an Oscar Meyer does,
Allan would have to pump up the volume by pumping his bacon full of
water and preservatives the way Oscar Meyer does. And that ain't
gonna happen.

Allan dry cures his bacon. Hand rubs it
with salt and brown sugar and sets it aside to cure for a month. Then it's wreathed in thick hickory and applewood smoke before being sliced, hand packaged and vacuum sealed. The result is not your
anemic supermarket bacon. Uh-uh. When you bite Allan's bacon, it
bites back. Some might consider the unctuous salty-sweet-smokiness an
acquired taste, but man, once you acquire it, you'll never go back to
bland bacon. The pork Allan processes comes from pasture-raised heritage breed pigs; animals that are never subjected to concrete feed lots and are never pumped full of hormones.

Here's Allan's take; “This is the way
bacon was made for years. This is the way it was made years ago. Now
we're going quicker. But our goal isn't to make it quicker. It's to
make the best bacon we can make."

And it's Allan's dedication to hands-on
quality that's put him at the top of the culinary world. Yeah, he
could probably be a kajillionaire if he sold out, but he does pretty
darn well with the client list he's established over the years. Tom
Colicchio, Sean Brock, Hugh Acheson, Thomas Keller, Emeril Lagasse, John Besh, David
Chang and a host of kitchen heavyweights from coast to coast and
border to border scarf up as much of his premium pork product as they
can possibly procure. In fact, Chang calls Allan a “hero” and
refers to his pork as “the ultimate old-school product.” John T.
Edge, noted writer, commentator, and director of the Southern
Foodways Alliance unabashedly calls Benton's “the country's best
bacon.”

Allan's mail order business is booming.
You want a couple of pounds of bacon? No problem. Order online today
and in four to six weeks it'll be delivered to your door. Or you can
follow my lead and make an occasional hundred mile detour just to
drop by the shop.

And you know what? I'll bet Allan will
show me that James Beard award next time I'm in the neighborhood. But
he won't have it out on display. That's not his style. He takes quiet
pride in his accomplishments. To him it's just about a job well done.
That's the way “ol' hillbillies” look at things.

Congratulations, Allan, on yet another
well-deserved recognition.

Note: Check out Allan's appearance
on the award-winning PBS series “Mind of a Chef.” Look for Season
1: Episode 15 “Smoke” in which chef David Chang “profiles
regional barbecue in North Carolina, Texas and Kansas City and the
otherworldly smoky bacon from Allen Benton in Tennessee.” It's
available on DVD and is also streaming on Netflix. There's also a little YouTube short on Benton's at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6LHOpk8XoE.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)